Over the Knee (4 page)

Then his hand returned to my bottom, delivering another volley of smart slaps. These were much harder and I couldn’t help kicking my feet. I felt my knickers slip off my right ankle, but I couldn’t do anything about it. Besides, resisting was part of the appeal. Silently I urged him to do it harder, but he was being very cautious. He stopped again and resumed his exploration of my sex, probing the wetness. When he dipped his finger inside me I gasped, then lowered my head back to the sofa. I parted my legs, inviting him further. He obliged, swirling his finger deep inside, making me clutch at the cushions.

Then his hand was back on my bottom, smacking me sharply. I struggled feebly and twisted on his lap, hungry for release. But I couldn’t think how to get my own hand underneath to assist.

The spanking stopped and the touching began again. I was less concerned about the noise now and I panted and gasped loudly as the stimulation made me quiver. He teased me with his right hand while his left found the buttons of my blouse and began to unfasten them. I lifted myself up enough to give him access and he undid two of them, before slipping his hand inside to cup my breasts. My nipples stiffened in response to the attention and he pinched them through the fabric of my bra.

I was hyper-stimulated from the spanking, on the point of overload. He slid his fingers up and down the groove of
my
sex, finally pinching the hard little nub at the top. That was all it took. With a wild cry I surrendered to the barrage of pulsing, undulating waves, clinging to the sofa as though I would float away without an anchor.

As the tremors began to die away I became aware for the first time of the hard uncomfortable bulge of his erection and I reached underneath myself to touch it, squeeze it. He drew in a ragged breath as I did and he froze until I released him.

My limbs still unsteady, I clambered off his lap and dropped to my knees, eager to reward him. I unzipped him and freed his cock, then caressed it and kneaded it in my hands. I ran my tongue along the underside and it twitched and stiffened in response.

Wrapping my fingers around the base of the shaft, I exerted a little more pressure, encircling his balls and pulling the flesh taut. He gave a sharp intake of breath and I watched as a glistening pearl of moisture appeared at the tip. The salty drop was gone with a flick of my tongue and he murmured something incomprehensible. Lapping at the little fold just underneath the head I heard him groan and I took him in my mouth.

He clutched my head in his hands, pushing me up and down along his length. It wouldn’t take him long. I let him guide my rhythm and within seconds I felt the shudders of his climax and he emptied himself into my mouth.

I swallowed every drop and then raised my head. Paul’s face was flushed and it took him several moments to catch his breath. He tousled my hair affectionately as I smiled up at him. I rubbed my bottom, wishing now that it had been harder. The sensation was fading already.

‘That was nice,’ I said at last, not knowing what else to say.

‘You weren’t bad either,’ he joked, still breathless. ‘In fact, I think you’ve earned the book. Just be sure to return it on time or you’ll be in trouble.’

I smiled and curled up on the sofa next to him. ‘Promise?’

‘Promise.’ He pulled me on to his lap and I affected an exaggerated hiss of pain. His hands cradled my bottom,
squeezing
gently. ‘Mmmm, you’re still very warm. Positively radiant.’

‘You have no idea how long I’ve wanted to feel like this,’ I told him.

‘You have no idea how long I’ve been wanting to do that,’ he countered. ‘I remember drawing handprints on girls’ bottoms in magazines when I was a little boy.’

I giggled, charmed by the image. ‘Well, I used to lie across the lap of my giant teddy bear and pretend he was … well, you know.’

Paul laughed. ‘That’s dead clever,’ he said, giving my bottom an affectionate squeeze. ‘If a bit deviant.’

‘I was a strange little girl.’

Suddenly, Paul stiffened.

‘What is it?’

‘Shh!’ He cocked his head, listening intently. Then he sprang to his feet, doing up his jeans in a panic. ‘Oh, bollocks!’

‘What?’ I demanded, getting frightened.

‘She’s home!’

It took me a few seconds to process the situation, but it suddenly came clear. The spotless flat. His initial nervousness. Flatmates indeed.

I scrambled up off the sofa as he shoved the coffee table back into its place. He grabbed the book and thrust it at me, nearly making me drop it. He waved his hands wildly at me in a shooing-away gesture. I shook my head in bewilderment. Where the hell was I supposed to go?

‘Hi, sweetie!’ came a cheery female voice from the front door.

‘Hi!’ Paul called back. ‘Be right there!’

‘That’s OK, I’m gonna have a bath. I’m knackered.’

There was the sound of footsteps clumping up the stairs and Paul waited until he heard the bathroom door shut before dragging me by the arm to the front door.

The panic was contagious and the outrage didn’t hit me until I was past the threshold. I crossed my arms over my chest and shook my head at Paul in scathing disapproval.

He offered me a pathetic shrug and glanced back behind him miserably. ‘She doesn’t know,’ he whispered, a look of desperate pleading in his eyes.

‘I gathered that much,’ I said with a frosty smile. ‘Thanks anyway.’

And I turned on my heel and marched away. It was only when I got to the top of the street that I realised I’d left my knickers behind. But somehow the idea of Paul’s girlfriend finding them seemed only fair.

Three

‘WHAT THAT GIRL
wants is a damned good thrashing.’

I would never forget hearing my father say those words. Not about me. No, never about me. It was a little girl around my age, throwing a screaming tantrum in Marks and Spencer having been refused sweets.

Like a tableau vivant, the scene was frozen in my memory. I could recall every detail. The shrill little harpy stamping her pink ballerina shoes on the lino floor. Her ineffectual mother looking around her in embarrassed desperation, as though hoping a passing stranger would offer assistance. The disgusted expressions on the elderly couple as they shuffled past.

The inauthentic howls of misery became more and more outrageous each time the little girl shaped her quivering lips around the word ‘chocolate’. My parents, at first startled, quickly lost patience. And then there was my father’s comment, which he intended to be overheard.

It would never have occurred to me to act like that and I was frightened on a deep level by the extremity of the girl’s behaviour. That my father could say she deserved a thrashing for it only magnified that it was quite beyond the pale. I watched, transfixed, to see if the thrashing would happen. In the end, the harried mother gave in to the child’s demands and there were audible mutters of disapproval from the elderly couple. I was both thrilled and conflicted by my father’s remark. Curious yet repelled. What was a thrashing like? Some dark confused part of me
desperately
wanted to know. But I would never be able to bring myself to act like a two-year-old brat to earn a spanking. Even as a child, I had my dignity.

I’d never seen a proper over-the-knee spanking. The ones in cartoons didn’t count. Those old classics from the 1940s and 50s always seemed to have some character being pulled over someone’s knee and smacked. I was drawn to those particular scenes, with no idea why they fascinated me.

Then there was Bad Hospital – a peculiar game I used to play with my cousin Gina when we were little. There wasn’t really a story. We were just two girls trapped in a giant hospital and the object of the game was to avoid the wicked doctors with their evil needles. (We had a paralysing fear of needles.) The game involved crawling under beds and behind sofas, screaming whenever we encountered our imaginary pursuers. Then we would run frantically to find another hiding place. In my mind, there were other things these unseen evil doctors would do to us if they caught us, but Gina remained fixated on needles and wouldn’t follow my hints of other torments.

One day Gina’s brother Davy asked if he could play too. At first Gina said no, but I was quite keen, especially when he said he wanted to be one of the doctors. He was only a few years older than us, but he was almost a teenager, so he seemed worldly and wise to me. He was my first crush. And when he found me hiding behind the long velvet curtains in the sitting room I shrieked and ran from him, but not fast enough. He pounced on me and sat on my back, pinning me to the carpet. Then he whacked my bottom, exclaiming triumphantly that he’d just given me a shot that would knock me out so I couldn’t escape. It was only a little smack, but it had resounded through my entire body like an electric shock.

I was giddy with strange excitement and I feigned succumbing to the knockout drug. I watched as Davy raced after his squealing sister and overcame her as well. We lay grinning at each other across the room while our conqueror stood, hands on hips like a superhero, nodding
proudly
at having vanquished us. And all I could think of was escaping so I could be captured and smacked again. And again. And again.

My feelings were a maelstrom of heady ambivalence. And they only intensified as I grew up. I couldn’t articulate it. There was something unfathomably appealing about an unruly girl being hauled across a strong man’s knee and spanked, yet I had no wish to be beaten or abused. I didn’t really know where the line was. Sometimes it frightened me and I wished I could be rid of the bizarre fascination. I tried to think of other, so-called
normal
things. But it was no use; images imposed themselves on me unbidden. Whatever this affliction was, it was wired into me.

In primary school, Juliet Fairfax told me how she used to get her brother into trouble just to see him spanked. Naturally, he did the same to her. This thrilled me and I played at her house often, mainly in the hope of seeing it happen. I longed for a brother or sister of my own. Someone to get
me
into trouble.

Once Miss Baker smacked Sara Robinson for drawing something ‘vulgar’ I never got to see. The teacher hauled Sara up out of her desk and gave her two brisk swats on the rear. That was all. But Sara’s eyes went wide with astonishment and then they filled with tears. It couldn’t possibly have hurt, but she wailed as though she’d lost a limb.

My heart hammered in my chest and I replayed the event obsessively in my mind. I embellished it, making Miss Baker pull Sara over her knee and bare her bottom for a long hard spanking. Just like in the cartoons and movies that made me feel so funny. What would the teacher’s pale hand feel like against my own bottom? What was it like to be bent over someone’s knee?

Some part of me knew enough to feel ashamed and that only confused me more. Worse, I was certain that everyone knew what I was thinking, that my mind was somehow broadcasting the images for all to see. Miss Baker would think I really
wanted
to be spanked. But then, didn’t I? When the other little girls played school, I always secretly
hoped
there would be a spanking. None of them ever mentioned it, though, and I was left feeling alienated. Isolated. Dying both of curiosity and the fear that it would be satisfied. But in spite of (or perhaps because of) my fixation, I was well behaved in school.

The only time I did misbehave in Miss Baker’s class, I was doodling instead of paying attention to the lesson. She called my name and told me to stand up. Instantly I feared the worst. My skin turned to ice as I clambered out of my seat, my legs weak and uncertain. But she didn’t spank me; she put me in the corner instead. I couldn’t reconcile my simultaneous feelings of relief and disappointment. Humiliated, I cried softly as the lesson continued behind me while I stood with my nose pressed into the angle of the walls, excluded. It was a feeling I would come to know well – the loneliness of the one who knows she is ‘different’.

As a teenager I kept a secret video library of all the movie and TV spankings I could find. In the films made before political correctness, there were plenty.
Kiss Me Kate
and
McClintock
were two of the best. Naturally, BBC drama was a fertile source, replete with Dickensian floggings and canings. I hooked up two VCRs and copied scenes from TV movies and rented videos. I was devastated when I finally wore out my grainy pirated VHS cassettes, victims of too much obsessive rewinding and pausing.

I pretended to share my father’s fascination with the days of fighting sail. But what really hooked me was the severe discipline of the Royal Navy in its glory days. Rum, sodomy and the lash. Common sailors were flogged, and midshipmen were bent over a cannon and caned across the seat of their tight white breeches.
Damn the Defiant
had a tantalising subplot with a sadistic first lieutenant and a hapless midshipman who found himself kissing the gunner’s daughter at every opportunity.

One of my dad’s books gave me fantasy fodder for weeks. It was about ‘female tars’ – women who went to sea disguised as men and boys. A sailor’s wife could expect a miserable existence on shore. The sea offered freedom,
adventure
and the chance to earn her own money. There was so much scope for fantasy there. The captain might agree to keep her secret and make her his personal cabin boy, subject to his discipline, naturally. Or perhaps the ship would be captured by pirates and the ‘boy’ taken prisoner. There was no shortage of punishment scenes in the books and movies set in that era.

My mum liked Elvis, so I bought her
Blue Hawaii
for Christmas one year. I’d heard there was a spanking scene in it. I was unprepared for the suggestion that we all watch it as a family. I had counted on being able to see it on my own sometime later. So I watched it with my parents, burning with embarrassment at what I knew was coming. I was sure they would know why I had chosen that particular movie. And when Elvis dragged the bratty girl over his knee for a few well-deserved smacks, I slid down into the cushions of the sofa, turning away so they couldn’t see my scarlet face.